Okay.. unless you live in a hole in the blogosphere, you’ve probably read a few hot topics related with the two. First off, looks like WidgetBucks got Google slapped, and are currently blacklisted from the index. There are various theories from their Flash banner to their non-Flash content to their TOC. Either way, it’s sent up some red flags that are rippling around the internet.

Does this mean that our publishing web sites are potentially exposed to issues? Should I continue to use WidgetBucks, etc? I just received an email about new code for WidgetBucks that were used to help page load of the ‘ad’, but I wasn’t really able to see an improvement, but makes me wonder if it’s because of the bad press, that they’re trying to get pro-active.

Personally, I want to ride this out for a bit, and give this experiment a fair shake. The bottom line is that they seem to be performing better on my poor-Adsense sites. For sites where AdSense peforms well… I will NOT put WidgetBucks up.

The next topic is that Google released their updated page rank. Many bloggers are complaining of a drop in ranking (possibly related to WidgetBucks, selling text-links, who knows). The theories are spreading fast, but no real solid information is out there. As for me, this blog is PR0 and I was pleased to see that it didn’t drop any further. Seriously, all my ranking sites seem to have held steady. No increases, but no decreases.

Want to know what your PR (page rank) is? Download the SearchStatus plugin for FireFox. Or you can use the page rank script.

Wow.. just noticed that Money-Code.com is up to PR2. That’s pretty quick for a month old blog, sounds like good timing of the launch. Now to get below 1,000,000 in Alexa!